Cradling a twin in each arm, the photo of Jill Dudley tells a deceptive story. A former debutante and distant relative of post-war British prime minister Clement Attlee, she appears the epitome of a contented Sixties upper middle-class housewife and mother.

Other photographs of her identical twins Alex and Marcus confirm the impression of a seemingly idyllic, innocent childhood growing up in a beautiful Elizabethan home in Sussex.

The boys, two peas in a pod in their matching outfits, look happy and carefree as they play conkers or sit together on the bonnet of the family car.

The photographs seem all the more poignant given that their father, salesman John Lewis, was killed in a car crash just three weeks after their birth, leaving Jill a young widow.

Respectable: Alex and Marcus's mother, around the age she was a debutante

But hard though it is to believe, their seemingly loving mother was nothing of the sort. Monstrously, she was sexually abusing her little boys.

Today, Alex and Marcus Lewis - now 49 - are still coming to terms with this dark secret, which was for so long buried within the heart of their family.

'I'd like to think our mother loved us and wanted to protect us, but what kind of mother sexually abuses her own children?' says Alex.

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'It would be easy to label her as mentally ill or a monster, but it's not that simple. You could put any label on her and it wouldn't be enough.'

To look at the twins, you would never imagine they could have been the victims of such horrors. Or that, even more distressingly, their mother occasionally 'passed them around' male friends in London, who also abused them.

Today, they have prosperous lives as highly successful business partners running a multi-million-pound property portfolio in London and a boutique hotel on the African island of Pemba, just off Zanzibar.

Fatherless: The only picture the boys were ever in with their father, who died hours or days after this was taken

Both are happily married. Alex, his wife and their two sons, aged six and two, live in Chichester; and Marcus shares a three-bedroom townhouse in North London with his wife and their two children, aged six and three.

'By telling our story, we want to show you have a choice. You can stay a victim and go down, or step up and move on with your life,' says Alex.Marcus adds: 'Our childhood was grim, though we didn't realise it at the time. We thought it was normal.

'Without a doubt we survived because we had each other. Our bond was so close and our love for each other unconditional. It was as if we had our own protective bubble.'

Alex and Marcus are the authors of a remarkable new book, Tell Me Who I Am, co-written by Joanna Hodgkin, in which they tell their astonishing story.

The book would never have been written had Alex not lost his memory, aged 18, after suffering head injuries in a motorbike accident.

When he came out of a week-long coma after the accident, he instantly recognised his twin Marcus, but had absolutely no recollection of anything or anyone else - including his mother and the terrible deeds she had committed.

'When I woke up and saw my twin, the recognition was instant,' he says. 'It was only moments later that I realised I didn't know anything else. It was as if someone had pressed the delete button on a computer.'

'There was this hysterical, crazy woman running around the bed, towering over me,' says Alex.

'Her energy was so alarming that my one thought was “Stop her. Make her go away”, which they eventually did. I didn't know who she was.'

Indeed, when Alex returned to his childhood home, it was as if he was walking into a stranger's house. He had no memory of his stepfather Jack Dudley or his younger half-siblings, Oliver and Amanda.

So he relied heavily on Marcus to fill in the gaps of the childhood he'd completely forgotten - and his twin made a decision to protect him from dealing with what had happened.

'When Alex woke up from his coma, I was totally unaware he'd lost his memory. When it became apparent he had, I thought he was lucky not to have any memory of our past,' says Marcus.

'I decided not to tell him the truth. I wanted to protect him and there weren't many nice things to say.

'The more I didn't mention it, the harder it became. Once I got past that point of no return, I made a pledge to myself that I was never going to tell him. By pretending it never happened, I could bottle it all up and make it go away.'

Brothers: Twins Ali and Marky were never far apart - it was this bond between the two that helped them survive

After their father's death, Jill re-married accountant Jack Dudley, a fearsome, difficult man more than 20 years her senior.

She was his fourth wife and he favoured their two children, Oliver and Amanda, over the twins, who were forced to sleep in a garden shed without any heating.

'Jack was a very frightening man. You did not challenge him, absolutely not,' says Alex.

'You stood up when he came into the room and you called him “Sir”. We weren't allowed in his quarters in the house, which were extensive, or to speak to him without a good reason.

'We were obedient. We did exactly as we were told. Every night we'd go into his study, shake his hand and say: “Goodnight, Sir.”

'As children, you accept everything you are told - you think it's normal. We used to think it was other people who were strange.'

Jill - a flamboyant, noisy, dramatic, eccentric woman with size ten feet - gave the impression of not having a penny to her name, dressing in charity shop clothes and running a vintage stall in London's Portobello market.

Though she boasted that her friends included countesses, the twins remember there never being enough food at home - they would wolf down meals at other people's houses because they were so hungry.

The boys were sent to a private prep school, but when it was discovered that they were severely dyslexic - or 'stupid', as Jack preferred to say - they were dumped in a comprehensive, where they were horribly bullied. At home, they were treated like servants.

Horrific: Jill's fun-loving instincts made her popular with children

To this day, Marcus finds it difficult to talk about the abuse, which he says was sporadic and seemed to stem from Jill's voracious sexual appetite and total lack of inhibition. Embracing the sexual liberation ushered in by the Swinging Sixties, she moved in a louche, Bohemian world.

Is it just coincidence, they wonder, that their mother was of the same generation as Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, inhabiting a society - radically altered by the sexual revolution - where the young were seen as ripe for exploitation?

Despite Jack's callous disregard for the twins, Marcus is convinced he had no idea what his wife was doing and would have stopped it had he known.

'As a child, you accept it as something that happens. It's only as you get older that you start to realise that it's wrong,' he says.

'From around the age of ten, you start to know that it's not acceptable, but you are too frightened to say anything.

'You have this intense fear of something dreadful happening if you tell. You become frightened and paralysed. It wasn't happening every day - it was sporadic. Alex and I never spoke of it, which is strange because we talked about everything else.'

The twins struggle to understand what drove their mother to behave the way she did, apparently oblivious to the psychological harm she was inflicting on them.

Marcus says: 'Our mother was a very sexual person. She came from a strict, conservative background and her upbringing was extremely conventional. Then, later in life, she became highly sexualised and took it too far.'

Alex adds: 'She didn't have any boundaries. This was her main problem in life. Whether it was turning up uninvited to our parties and saying inappropriate things to our friends or wearing outrageous clothes, she just didn't think it was wrong.'

Amnesia: Alex lost his memory aged 18 in a motorbike accident; it was this which impelled he and his twin to reflect back on their mother's history of abuse

Alex and Marcus wish they could say their mother had been nothing worse than naive in leaving her young sons (one at a time, never together) overnight with male friends who sexually abused them.

She would drop them off at a house and pick them up the next morning.

'Without a doubt our mother knew exactly what she was doing. She was in no way naive - she was far too devious and clever,' says Marcus.

'She was streetwise and never let anyone get one over her. What was she getting out of it? Was she being paid? We have no idea.'

Perhaps it was no wonder that Marcus chose not to enlighten Alex about their past after he lost his memory. The charade, which enabled Marcus to forget, too, lasted until they were 32.

'Our mother was dying and I remember thinking it strange that my siblings were a bit bothered, but not that much,' says Alex.

She died aged 64 in 1995, five years after Jack had passed away, at 81.

'When she died, I was the only one crying. I thought: “Hang on a sec, this isn't right.” Up until then I had never questioned a thing about what I'd been told about our childhood,' says Alex.

Catharsis: Marcus (right) retold Alex the story of their childhood, and they have now written a book about their ordeals

After her death, the twins were stunned to discover that far from being too poor to feed them properly, their mother had been hoarding money left to her by various members of the Attlee family. According to Alex, it amounted to 'millions'.

Indeed, she had been an obsessive hoarder. It took her children a year to clear out the family home. Priceless antiques were hidden among piles of rubbish. Birthday cards from relatives containing money for the children had been stuffed unopened into drawers.

Behind a concealed door in a wardrobe they found photographs, letters, documents, bric-a-brac, a collection of sex toys and - disturbingly - a naked picture of the twins.

'By that time, Marcus believed his own fantasy. He couldn't acknowledge the truth to himself, let alone me,' says Alex.

The truth slowly started to emerge after Alex visited a healer in a failed attempt to recover his memory. She told him she suspected he'd been abused.

Their younger sibling Oliver also started seeing a therapist to deal with the abuse he'd suffered.Alex says he knew about 30 per cent of his past when he embarked on his book project two years ago in a bid to excavate the rest.

'Marcus tried to stop me from doing it - I can see now out of love,' says Alex.

New joy: Marcus at his wedding to his wife, with whom he has two children, aged six and three

'He wanted to protect me from the truth, but I needed to know. The quest is now over. I can finally leave the past behind and move on. I feel lighter.'

But the strain of digging up the past had a terrible effect on Marcus. 'We were three-quarters of the way through the book when I had a complete meltdown. I just couldn't contain it any longer,' he says.

It was triggered by a vivid memory as he was driving past a flat he recognised in London's Gloucester Road. It had belonged to one of Jill's female friends.

Aged 12, he and Alex had been recruited to serve drinks and canapes to guests at a party and Marcus remembered coming face to face with one of his abusers.

'I could see a man in the drawing room who had done unbelievable things to me. And I had to serve him a drink,' he recalls in the book. 'I was so frightened I peed myself in the hall, right in front of everyone, frozen on the spot aged 12.

'My mother must have known what that was about. I can see him now, in the corner of the room by the window.

'And I went into the kitchen and threw food over myself, so I could disguise what had happened.'

Along with traumatic memories, there were other disturbing discoveries. The brothers found out that their 'quiet, decent, nervous father' had crashed his car driving one of the twins home from hospital after being told he might not be the boys' father.

Bright future: Marcus and Alex are looking forward to giving their children happy lives

Old letters revealed that marriage had been no barrier to Jill's thirst for sexual adventure. It was her own brother who'd warned John Lewis about her infidelity. Jill never spoke to him again and banned him from her funeral.

Worse still, after their father's death, Jill abandoned her twins in a children's home for a year until she was shamed by relatives into taking them back.

'She didn't abandon us because she was distraught over losing our father. She was out, having boyfriends and all sorts. She wasn't sitting at home moping,' says Marcus.